Partitions of Windows 7 on Dell inspiron

I have recently purchase a Dell inspiron Ultrabook with Windows 7 Home edition. It came pre-installed with Windows and a lot of Dell software, so although my solid state hard drive (SSD) is 256 GB large, I have 181 GB free out of 216 GB. So how does this work?

Opening Disk Management shows that the main (and only) drive has 4 partitions:

1. 39 MB: OEM
2. 13.81 GB: Recovery
3. 216.62 GB: OS(C:) NTFS
4. 8.01 GB

Four partitions are the maximum a hard drive can handle. But I would like to install Ubuntu on this laptop as a dual boot next to Windows. That means, I need to get rid of one partition and free up some space.

The first partition is for the Windows Bootloader, the second is the Windows Recovery, number three is the 'regular' partition on which Windows is installed and can be accessed with the explorer. The fourth partition is for hibernation.

It's a good idea to get the Recovery onto some external media. Just follow the steps in the Dell Data Safe Local Backup. (Article ID : 266282). In my case, this were 3 DVDs.

Hibernation under Windows 7 is a deep sleep modus, where everything that was in the RAM gets written on the hard drive and then the power consumption is reduced. That's why the hibernation partition is 8 GB large, the same as the RAM in the laptop. Basically, it's a good idea to have it when you are not using the laptop and are on battery. But, SSDs don't like to have stuff written in one special part of the hard drive as it reduces the life of the SSD; and so it is not recommended to have hibernation with SSDs.

On the Sevenforums is a good manual on how to turn off (and on) hibernation. Turning it off will free an extra 8 GB of space on the hard drive.

Hibernation can be turned off using the windows command line in administrator mode. This is called an elevated command prompt. In the start menu, right click on command prompt and run as administrator. This will change the command prompt to C:\Windows\System32. Now, disable hibernation by typing powercfg -h off. To enable hibernation type powercfg -h on.